1996 - Backpacking Europe

Submitted by chris on Sun, 11/26/2006 - 16:07

View this trip on a map In 1996 I sold my trusty 1973 Volkswagon Camper and used the money to pay for a summer in Europe, a college man's right of passage. The trip included a 5 week study aboard program in Barcelona Spain, where I studied the Spanish language and a few other things.. like Spanish Art and Architecture, submersing myself in Gaudi!

2005 - Tunisia

Submitted by chris on Fri, 11/24/2006 - 19:53

View this trip on a map

In December 2005 we visited Tunisia, where we spent nearly 3 weeks. Tunisia is a very interesting country, especially when you get away from the capital of Tunis and move inland, away from the beach resorts.

International Community Producer (2000-2001)

Submitted by chris on Sun, 12/30/2001 - 23:33

In 2000 I became International Communities Producer at Yahoo!. This was a great opportunity for me because not only did I love working with online communities, but I also had a deep passion for understanding different cultures. In this position I worked to deploy and maintain Yahoo!s community services across Yahoo!'s 23 markets during a time of extremely rapid market growth both domesticaly and internationally.

At the time our services included:

  • Yahoo! Clubs
  • Yahoo! Photos and Briefcase
  • Yahoo! Member Directory and Profiles

Learning about the user needs within ea

Yahoo! Customer Care (1998-2000)

Submitted by chris on Sat, 12/30/2000 - 21:37

My first job after college and my "foot in the door" was as a Customer Care Representative at Yahoo! Inc. I was hired as the 10th person in the department and the 587th employee at Yahoo!.

This position not only placed me in a rapidly growing company with room for advancement, but it allowed me to experience how organizations deal with extreme growth, especially within an rapidly changing market environment.

Looking back, it is fascinating to remember that I provided the first technical support for a number of Yahoo! services that still exist today. Now that the Yahoo! Customer Care department has hundreds of employees based across the U.S. and the world, I am proud to say that I was one of the first and helped to shape the organization.

Most importantly, serving Yahoo! users directly was an excellent way to get to know the business and the customers it served. By working closely with both our user base and our product and engineering teams, I quickly learned the skills necessary to advance into Yahoo!'s production team and to build tools and services that met customer needs. I also had a chance to sleep under my desk during the many nights that we were faced with thousands of user emails that had to be answered using Netscape Communicator and cutting and pasting pre-written FAQ's from a Word document.